


The Universal Language

by swooning



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:34:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poetry is a good inspiration for smut. She ponders, and the shape of her thoughts is presaged by the poetry of Margaret Atwood. He ruminates, and no other poet but Pablo Neruda would do for setting the Admiral’s mood. Don't expect a plot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. More and More

...So be careful, I mean it,  
I give you fair warning:  
  
This kind of hunger draws  
everything into its own  
space; nor can we  
talk it all over, have a calm  
rational discussion.  
  
There is no reason for this, only  
a starved dog's logic about bones.   
  
_\-- Margaret Atwood_

* * *

  
  
She didn’t know exactly when it had happened. Possibly on Kobol, but then again possibly not until he had kissed her, broken the ice, as it were. She had been preoccupied with dying, after all; and then, there he was, suddenly present in her life in a way he had not been, suddenly sending a sharp pang of regret into her failing mind – had she really been too blind to consider the possibility? She knew when he had become a friend; that was quite plainly a product of Kobol and the time just after. But when had he become this  _other_  thing?   
  
After she recovered, she felt so  _much_ , had the energy to notice so much more, and then she saw what she had missed in her cancerous, drug-clouded haze. The way his eyes followed her around a room. The special tone in his voice, reserved for her and her alone. How his body leaned into hers, as though unconsciously expressing a desire to share her space. A yearning to touch, never fully realized.   
  
A few days’ hiatus during which she had not seen him, and then a trip to Galactica for… something, she couldn’t recall what. And she was startled to realize how  _short_  he was, barely taller than she, because in her thoughts and her memory his presence filled any room he was in. And she thought,  _When did I start to think this much about Bill?_  Only then, only then did she realize how very much his presence filled her mind. The way his eyes followed her – those eyes, Gods, how could she not have noticed – and she felt them searing through her pretense of decorum, pinning her to the wall of his attention like some hapless moth who had strayed into a loving collector’s net. The special tone in his voice, reserved for her alone, that singled her out in a gathering and caressed her wantonly from inside her own veins, heated tendrils fondling her in places she should not be thinking about during public meetings. How his body leaned into hers as though consciously willing hers to meet halfway, to stretch her fingertips just an inch more towards his…  
  
And now, although she did not know when or how it started, it had come to consume her. She wanted Bill so badly she ached, so badly she cried into her pillow at night, teenaged tears stinging her middle-aged heart with a bitterness long forgotten until this man, this fury-inducing, heart-wrenchingly strong man, had walked by and turned on that rusty tap and loosed the long-dormant flood of need.   
  
What could she do? There were choices, there were options. She sat at her desk and made a list of pros and cons, neatly dividing the page down the middle with a line drawn along a ruler, ranking the reasons for and against based on some set of criteria that seemed to make perfect sense at the time. When it came out overwhelmingly against the advisability of making her feelings known to the Admiral, she stared long and long at the page, listening to the lively debate between her head and her heart.   
  
In the end, as she had known must happen, she wadded the useless list and threw it into the wastebasket, placed her ruler back in the desk drawer, the pen back in the jar, and shuttled to Galactica. Where she met with the Admiral over mundane matters, none of which meant a thing to her at that moment, as her knees were trembling and her stomach fluttering at the thought of what she intended.   
  
She would, if she could, inhabit him, possess him, pull him so close that their flesh would actually merge, bond permanently, perform some chemistry that no humans yet had ever accomplished, because no person could possibly have felt so much need in all of history as the need she felt at this moment for the Admiral, for  _Bill_ , Bill. Denied that opportunity, she would settle for having  _him_  inhabit at least a part of her, for a less lasting tie between their bodies, for something that would ease the ache awhile and free her mind again.   
  
And so she waited until their legitimate business was concluded, secured the hatch, and met his eyes with her practiced veil thrown aside, letting him see his own longing reflected back ten, a hundred, a thousandfold. He did not need to ask if she were sure. He took her so heatedly, that first time, that she was left wanting, desperate, scarcely able to hear his words of loving apology, of frantic adoration. But with his semen still meandering down her thighs, he bent to finish what he had started so impatiently, and by the time she came, and came again, to the rhythm of his fingers inside her, the strumming of his tongue on her clitoris, he was already hard again. He was inside her so quickly he rode out the last of her pleasure, grinning when she pulled him further in, used him shamelessly to draw out the sensation. Happy, to be used by her in that way.  
  
Longer, this time, and sweeter, with smiles and kisses, she still quaking and climax-tight around him, he quite thoroughly enthralled by her every inch, flavor, breath. She found she could clench her pussy around him and make him groan, make him flex his cock inside her by reflex. Then, feeling her shudder, he flexed it again by design. He kissed her face, her eyes and cheeks, the tip of her nose. He pulled her on top of him, wrapped his hands with surprising care around her breasts, holding them steady while the rest of her moved gently back and forth over him. Brushed her nipples with his thumbs, the age-old admiration of all men on his face for the phenomenon of their hardening in response.  _See what I can do?_  She showed him a trick even better, even older, one they shared this second time, working hard to attain it at the end, straining into one another in joyous agreement.   
  
When it was over, they lay on their backs, arms and legs still entwined, slickness growing sticky as they cooled. He kissed her fingers idly, pensively, never wanting her to leave. He couldn’t say so, and did not say so. Leave she must, and did, with fewer words than she wanted to say. How could she say, on the spur of the moment, that she loved him so much it was physically painful to let go of his hand, much less pull her body away from his? How could she tell him that she could never possibly get close enough, that she wanted to occupy the same unit of space he did, that she wanted to shrink herself down to pocket-size so he could carry her around all day? She couldn’t, and didn’t. But she thought it.   
  
She thought it, and it consumed her, because she longed to consume  _him_ , be consumed  _by_  him, and she was not even out the hatch before she knew she would be back again and again. She had not even strapped herself into the seat of the shuttle before she knew she would happily make a fool of herself to please him, gain his love, precisely  _because_  he was the type of man who did not suffer fools. Moth to his flame, to his collector’s net and pin, and willingly so.  
  
The shuttle took her back to her own ship, because the pilot heard only her words, telling him to fly to Colonial One. He could not hear her body, heart, mind, weeping to be returned to Bill’s embrace, to the only atmosphere that could now sustain them.


	2. The Infinite One

Do you see these hands? They have measured  
the earth, they have separated  
minerals and grains,  
they have made peace and war,  
they have demolished the distances  
of all the seas and rivers,  
and yet,  
when they move over you,  
little one,  
grain of wheat, swallow,  
they can not encompass you...  
  
 _\-- Pablo Neruda_  
  


* * *

  
  
He had some sympathy for stalkers, now. He had watched her for months, of course, never dreaming it was so obvious, though not really caring if it were. It was an obsession, and he knew it, and he had let himself wallow in it a little. Look longer, stand closer than he should, just by fractions. The way her mouth moved when she talked, the way her teeth flicked out an ‘f’ like she was getting rid of something unwanted, the way her lips welcomed a ‘b.’ He had wanted to be spoken by her, be an ‘l’ with her tongue wrapping him up, carrying him to the roof of her mouth to expire in bliss.   
  
He had always thought that if, by some chance, something ever happened between them, the shine would come off, the whole thing would be reduced by reality into something manageable. Fun, certainly, but no longer magical.   
  
He could not have been more wrong. It made it worse by a quantum factor. Laura, real, was so much more compelling than his tired old mind had conjured her, that he feared he might never accomplish another thing but to follow her, possess her, try to  _know_  her. As if he ever could. Bill had been to every one of the twelve Colonies, to Kobol even, to moons and asteroid fields and the vastnesses of space, but her eyes alone were deeper than all that. Being inside her was beyond all reckoning. He had flown space ships and killed with his bare hands, but what use were his hands now, if not to be feeling their way along Laura’s thigh or burrowing in her hair to pull her closer? What use fingers, if not to explore her every inch, outside and inside, as far as he could reach? No use at all; as little use as an aging man, trying to hold together the tattered remnants of civilization while his mind and body go chasing after the unattainable.  
  
He had frakked her, devoured her, but still felt so vastly surprised by her that he sometimes wondered if he had dreamt it all. If so, it was one hell of a recurring dream.   
  
She had come to him one final time before leaving for ‘the frakking planet,’ had said the Quorum and the voters and the press could go and collectively screw themselves, she was staying the entire night. Then she threw herself upon him with the ferocity of a lioness in heat, removing his clothes in record time before sinking to her knees and demonstrating a startling aptitude for going down. Bill tried to hold off, but she would have none of it, hastening his climax by trailing the backs of her fingernails with excruciating dexterity over and under his balls as she slid her tongue more firmly against his cock. When she tipped her head just so, swallowed him deeper, he cursed softly and came explosively, very nearly falling over her as the blood rushed from his brain.   
  
She was smug afterwards, but a little defiant, too. “We have  _all night,_ ” she reminded him, as if he had argued otherwise. As if he could have argued, at that point, with anything she said or did.  
  
What she did, without further ado, was disappear into the head and take a shower – her last for some time, she pointed out. After some three minutes had passed, she poked her head back out around the hatch and asked him what he was waiting for.  
  
He knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He fell asleep slightly chafed from overuse, and woke up feeling like he had been hit by a truck. An extremely sexy truck, with soft skin, long legs, and teeth that only bit when he wanted them to… but a truck, nonetheless. But still, he was a healthy male, and woke up about like most healthy males do, even occasionally those in their sixties. He pondered what he might do about this, felt around for Laura, then heard the shower about the time his sleep and sex-addled brain finally registered she was not in the rack.   
  
Thinking he would join her again – it had worked out well the last time, after all – he headed for the hatch, only to stop when he had opened it just a notch. He could hear not just the shower now, but her, Laura, crying. Even sick unto death, she hadn’t sobbed with such desperate abandon, and he froze in his tracks. Unable to retreat, because she was in pain and he wanted to hold her, comfort her, tell her it would be all right. Unable to move forward, because he could not offer comfort, could not say anything to make this right, could not possibly hold her tightly enough to contain all the anguish and rage that he could hear her in her weeping voice. He had tried last night, the Gods knew, but he had never been much good at it before, and the apocalypse had not suddenly gifted him with new nurturing skills.   
  
“Bill?”  
  
 _Frak_. “Yeah…”  
  
“I’ll be out in a second.” If he hadn’t heard her moments before, he would not have known she’d been crying, from her voice. Well… perhaps he would, at that. He had grown to know its every nuance so well, having heard her in humor and ire, grief and passion, over the past months. And now she was going away. He might never hear her voice again, not in person. It was like a piece of his soul was walking away from him. Nothing he could do about that.   
  
He would if he could. He had tried to joke about it with her, during the night, describing how they would live like royalty up on Galactica while the poor slobs toiled below on that sorry little planet. But she had held up her hand, placed a finger over his lips, and simply said, “Don’t.”  
  
Now she brushed by him, making a production out of wrapping a towel around her hair, and he knew she was doing it for an excuse not to look at him, to obscure her face. She did not know he had overheard, evidently. He took a step toward her, spoke her name softly, and she flipped the twisted towel up and over with her hair neatly rolled inside before letting her eyes flicker his way for the briefest of glances.   
  
“Don’t,” she said again, more sharply than she meant to.   
  
Ah. So she did know.   
  
“Go take your shower, Bill,” she urged him, voice a bit gentler. “I need to get dressed.”  
  
He did. He could not bear to cross her, though he had so little difficulty doing so on most occasions.  _Lily-livered sap,_  he admonished himself when he got out a few minutes later. Because she was already gone.   
  
And even though he knew why she had left that way –  _saying goodbye would have torn her apart,_  he acknowledged silently to himself – he would have given anything to have her back for just that few more minutes. Or to rewind just a few minutes more than that, to have opened the hatch and intruded on her in the shower, taken her in his arms for the comfort he had been unable to impart last night.   
  
 _It was the wrong choice_.   
  
It so often was.


	3. Variations on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,  
which may not happen.  
I would like to watch you,  
sleeping. I would like to sleep  
with you, to enter  
your sleep as its smooth dark wave  
slides over my head  
  
and walk with you through that lucent  
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves  
with its watery sun & three moons  
towards the cave where you must descend,  
towards your worst fear...  
  
 _\-- Margaret Atwood_  
  


* * *

  
  
  
She thought about that night often. She carried it with her always, in fact, a warm and cozy retreat that was only a blink away when the reality of New Caprica threatened to encroach too far on the shaky ground of her sanity. Other nights with Bill, too, but the most recent was the clearest and sharpest memory that she had to fall back on, so it usually took center stage in her thoughts.   
  
People saw her walking down the street and saw a woman who looked serene, unfazed by anything, utterly self-possessed and even something like happy. They even remarked on it, once in a while. Laura always smiled silently, enigmatically, and let the subject drop. She could not tell them the truth, that if she seemed blissful it was because she did not inhabit New Caprica much at all; rather, she was still up on Galactica nearly all the time, reliving each moment spent with Bill in such detail that she could have related the precise instant he flexed a muscle, closed his eyes, the exact tone and timbre of each snore that kept her awake. Not that she could have slept. Every single drop of water, the texture and feel of the soap and his skin under the soap, how it had felt when he ran his still-slippery hands over her body and pressed her up against the too-cold wall of the shower to make love to her. Steam and hands, kisses that blocked the water from spraying their faces. The ideal heights for this position, because she was an inch shorter but her legs were just enough longer… amazing that they had only discovered this at the end.   
  
Her mind automatically edited out  _’the end’_  and replaced it with a comforting static, like the sound of water on skin. She could walk along and, like Starbuck, hear nothing but the rain. At work, her mind could be busy with the children; she was almost  _too_  engaged, so prepared and so attentive that nothing slipped by her, although the students could only benefit from her dogged enthusiasm. Her rapport with them helped save her sanity, as did her calm, serene, quiet and happy surveillance work for the resistance movement that had arisen to oppose Baltar. People saw a smiling, centered, middle-aged woman walking down the street, and they never payed attention beyond that. As a teacher, as a former President, she had a plausible explanation for showing up almost anywhere. Her natural disguise worked every time.   
  
It grew trickier once the Cylons arrived, but at the same time was strangely not much different. She had felt trapped in a surreal hell under Baltar, and felt trapped in a surreal hell under the Cylons. One despot is much like another; the main difference was that the Cylons served better food during their interrogations. And that they surfeited the people through solicitude, rather than starving the people through neglect. She also suspected them of spiriting away individuals to breed with and experiment on… but at least they were showing initiative, which the Gods knew Baltar had not. And, while it was certainly perverse to think so, she felt she owed the Cylons something; their arrival meant the humans would  _have_  to leave the frakking planet, if they wanted to escape. When the people of the Twelve Colonies finally found Earth, they would have the Cylons to thank for kick-starting them on their way there again. Not that they  _would_  thank the Cylons, of course. Human memory was demonstrably short.  
  
At night, it was harder. She tried to give herself over to memory completely, only to have the real events of the day creep in under her guard as she drifted off to sleep. She never really got enough sleep, as a result. She would lie awake and try to remember instead of thinking, and eventually settle for something in between that neither sufficed nor satisfied.  
  
 _Bill’s snores_ … she had never actually slept with him before that night, and she had spent most of that time while he was asleep simply watching him, seeing the drape of the sheet change as it rose and fell with his breath, unaware of the moment when her breathing slipped into time with his. When she realized it had, she smiled silently and deliberately changed it, not wanting to feel lulled. Her awareness was all she had left. She wanted to  _feel_  every instant of this night, taste it, touch, see, smell, and hear it, if possible. The taste of soap, inadvertently ingested when the urge to lick at wet skin momentarily defeated sense. Touch, never enough, his skin could easily become the only thing in her world. The only thing except his eyes, filling her line of sight with blue, and more blue, and often his soul. The sharp, green smell of sex, only encouraging them to add to it; they were neither of them squeamish about that sort of thing. And the sounds of Bill’s voice as he rumbled out her name, or a playful command, or something far less specific, or his gentle snoring after he could no longer stay awake.   
  
She wondered briefly if he dreamt, and if so, of what. Probably nothing good, she thought, her eye falling on the scar that started at his sternum and disappeared beneath the covers. Like all of them, he had far more of the stuff of nightmares in his waking life, than that of any other sort of dream. Sleep was a dicey proposition at best, since the end of the world.   
  
If she had asked him, she knew he would immediately say he dreamed about  _her_ ; and then he would smirk, but refuse to tell her exactly what he had dreamed. He would hint about it for a day or so, though, using it as a hook to get her interested and annoyed by turns, a plank to build banter on. And then it would be forgotten, a joke past its prime.   
  
She would not ask, this time, because she did not want it to become another forgotten thing between them. If he was dreaming, let him remember it as long as he could, and she would remember watching him and wondering. As long as she did not ask, there was the possibility that he dreamt of her, and that it had been a dream he would not forget.


	4. The Question

Love, a question   
has destroyed you.  
  
I have come back to you  
from thorny uncertainty.  
  
I want you straight as  
the sword or the road.  
  
But you insist   
on keeping a nook  
of shadow that I do not want.  
  
My love,  
understand me,  
I love all of you,  
from eyes to feet, to toenails,  
inside,  
all the brightness, which you kept...  
  
 _\-- Pablo Neruda_  
  


* * *

  
  
  
He never wanted her to leave again.   
  
It presented certain problems, not least of which was that the fleet had scarcely completed its final jump away from New Caprica before she asked for quarters of her own, at least a bunk and a storage locker.   
  
He tried deliberate obtuseness, first. He told her she was being ridiculous, that she had no reason to worry about imposing when he  _wanted_  her there. He did not tell her the truth, that he would not only prefer she remain on Galactica from now on, he would really rather she never even step out of  _his quarters_  again. It just wasn't something you said, not if you were sane, anyway. Not that he felt entirely sure about his sanity, but why tip the crazy hand if it was still up in the air? He couldn't keep her there... but he could want to. He did want to. It made it hard to argue the less extreme alternative, that she merely reside there, returning promptly each evening upon conclusion of business. He was an effective commanding officer, and had long since come to terms with the importance of furlough for the morale of the troops.   
  
 _I know another way to… boost her morale,_  Bill thought, and proceeded to distract her with a loving assault, relearning each inch of flesh from her ears to her nipples as he disrobed her with a haste that belied his soothing words. He had missed her, and took pains to remind her that she missed him as well, and if he felt she was also more likely to stay in his cabin if he took all her clothes off, that was simply a bonus. Fair was fair, he kept her company there, he made it worth her while to stay. He pinned her firmly but gently to the bunk, then less gently, until their cries blocked out their reason, until the heat between them flooded their bodies and brains with something sweeter than mere possession.   
  
She stayed the night, and he fell asleep wrapped around her, counting it a victory.   
  
When she asked again, he shrugged the request aside, pointing out that there was simply no spare room, that she was  _billeted_  to his quarters, because the ship was full beyond capacity and everyone had to sleep  _somewhere_. There were fewer than two dozen ships in the fleet now, and everyone had to be accommodating in some way if they were all to  _be_  accommodated. In truth, he was annoyed that she kept bothering him about such a pointless issue. To Bill, it was obvious where she should sleep. With him. She wasn’t President anymore, and everyone knew anyway; or at least, everyone strongly suspected, and would hardly be surprised to have those suspicions confirmed.   
  
He kept her awake too late into that night to leave time for planning a move to other quarters. He reminded himself of the distinct textures and flavors to be found on her person, from the tang of salt that gathered in the silky creases beneath her breasts, to the sour pungency that gathered in the petal-soft creases between her labia. He lingered there until she cried out his name, shuddering under his lips, and he hid his smug smile in her lap.   
  
She stayed the night, and he wrapped himself around her but had trouble finding sleep, finding a vague disquiet instead.   
  
When next she tried to insist, he made the critical error of suggesting that she was lucky to be the one he wanted to share quarters with, because everyone else had to make do with so much less. And that he was  _busy,_  he had the follow-up of a major evacuation operation to tend to, and she needed to quit bringing it up. “Why is this so important to you?” he had asked. It had been the wrong thing to ask, had been a different question than the one she needed. But of course, if he had known that, known why that was so, he never would have said it in the first place.   
  
Bill watched her leave in a huff and was irritated, frustrated.  _This isn’t going according to plan_ , a state of affairs he could never abide. An understatement of the problem, as well. His subordinates did not fare well that morning, and word went out before very long that the Admiral was to be avoided at all costs by those wishing to keep their heads on their shoulders.  
  
He worked his day, his long day of ensuring the fleet got far enough away to defeat the Cylon pursuit, and tried to tune out the nagging anxiety about what had transpired with Laura. He only knew he had wanted her to be there when he finally had time to rest, wanted her to be  _part_  of that rest. Part of that peace. She would be there, and what she would be doing was  _waiting for him_. Just that, only that. Her sole purpose…  
  
It had taken over sixty years and two failed marriages for the light to come on, and when it finally did at that moment – in the corridor, on his way back to his quarters – it just about blinded Bill.  _Of course she won’t just be waiting. She doesn’t do that_. Then, stunning him further with its truth and simplicity,  _Nobody ever does that. It’s never just waiting, it’s never just doing something in the meantime. It’s life, it happens whether the person you’re waiting for shows up or not.  
  
I am what she did in the meantime._  
  
It wasn’t entirely true, of course. But true in a sense. True enough. His feet carried him only a few steps further before he stopped, knowing he would not find her there in his cabin, wondering where she would be instead. Where she was needed most.   
  
Distributing supplies, as it turned out. Laura, Zarek, Gaeta and some others manned the station that had been hastily set up outside the central storage bay for non-perishables. From his vantage point behind the queuing crowd, Bill could see Laura and the charismatic terrorist-turned politician engaged in surprisingly good-natured debate about the current rationing system, even as they worked in tandem to implement it.   
  
For a brief and horrible moment, Bill saw their easy familiarity and his stomach dropped, as he wondered – but no, she was clearly oblivious to the way Zarek’s eyes followed her, the way he was  _leaning_. Or, more probably, and more to Bill’s liking, she was quite keenly aware but deliberately ignoring it. When he heard her make a patronizing crack – “You’ve finally realized that anarchy doesn’t get the toilets scrubbed or the food farmed.  _Congratulations,_ Tom!” – Bill relaxed and snickered despite himself.   
  
Even over the crowd, she caught the sound and looked up instantly, eyes scanning until they found his. He was devastated to see the smile slip from her face to be replaced by wariness, weariness. Devastated to know he had put those things there. He watched as she dipped her head towards her colleagues, making her explanations, and then headed his way, her arms already crossed over her chest. Guard already firmly in place. She had even cleared the emotions from her face as neatly as tidying a desk, and she met him without a single chink in her chilly armor. Nodded, said something pleasant and inane that he responded to automatically, and led the way down the corridor. Back towards his quarters.   
  
 _Do I apologize? Do I ask her what she wants? What the flying frak am I supposed to be doing, here? She’s giving me nothing to work with._  On the other hand, she was still heading back to his place, potentially a good sign. Potentially. He took nothing for granted, where Laura was concerned.   
  
 _Nothing for granted…_  Another light flickered over Bill’s head, attempting to illuminate him. They stepped through the hatch, closed it behind them, and when she started to move on toward the couch, he caught her hand and arrested her motion. Then let her go, once she had turned, not trusting himself not to hold too tightly.   
  
“Laura…”  
  
“Bill.” Still, giving nothing away. He took a deep breath, and dove in.   
  
“It’s a big ship. We could find you a place. But I don’t want you to go.  _Will_  you stay here with me?”  
  
He held his breath, still not sure he had gotten it right, only hoping she forgave any clumsiness in execution.  
  
Laura looked at him, watched him for a moment, dispassion turning to speculation on her face as he watched her. At last, she let the smallest hint of a smile curve her lips, and let her shoulders relax a fraction of an inch.  
  
“Better,” she said softly, and turned to head back toward the couch.   
  
 _Better._ Bill let a silent sigh of relief escape while her back was turned, and then moved to join her.   
  
She stayed the night, and he made himself give her room on the rack, and sometime later, he felt her turn, and wrap herself around him, and he fell asleep thinking,  _better_.


	5. Variations on the Word Love

Then there's the two  
of us. This word  
is far too short for us, it has only  
four letters, too sparse  
to fill those deep bare  
vacuums between the stars  
that press on us with their deafness.  
It's not love we don't wish  
to fall into, but that fear.  
This word is not enough but it will  
have to do...    
  
 _\--Margaret Atwood_

* * *

  
  
She knew a few people from families where the word “love” had been on everyone’s lips all the time. An “I love you” at each greeting or parting, ending every phone conversation, emphasizing every embrace. She could recall when her own family had been that way, back when she had still had a family. Her father, in particular, had believed in telling his girls he loved them, and the girls had followed suit. But he took it with him, when he left. In the space of a millisecond, the “I love you” had been wiped from Laura’s life, as if it were a fourth person that died in that car along with her father and older sisters. Or perhaps her mother had really been the fourth person; all that had been bright, cheerful, and loving about her had vanished by the time she hung up the phone on that fateful call.   
  
Laura had spent years living with, tending to, eventually nursing an empty shell that only marginally resembled the mother she remembered. And only three times during those years could Laura recall she and her mother saying “I love you,” to one another. Twice at graduations, first from high school, and then from college when she got her first degree. And once more when her mother was almost at the end. It seemed the time for that sort of declaration, if ever there were a time. An apology for emotional abandonment, Laura did not get at that time, nor did she expect one. She had made a sort of peace with her mother’s living ghost, grieved that loss already, and was primarily only relieved to see an end to such long suffering.   
  
Once, in college, she had said it to a boy, because she had had sex with him, and assumed that if she liked him enough to surrender her virginity to him, she must be in love with him. Until the words had left her mouth, she didn’t realize that they meant nothing to her. That it was the feeling, not the willingness to say a particular phrase, that really matters; in this case, the feeling was absent. Unfortunately, it isn’t the sort of thing one can take back. But she had, actually, the very next week, when she realized she was actively dreading her next date with him. This tall, unprepossessing history major she had found so compelling only days before, whose smile had seemed to her like the future she wanted to have in store. He had begged, cursed, railed, but in the end had left, and she suspected he was the one who wrote her name and number on a bathroom wall in a seedy bar, leading to a string of very unwelcome (though highly educational) phone calls until she finally had the number changed. The whole thing had thrown her. She had always believed the old wives’ tale, that one could not look a person in the eye and say “I love you,” if one did not mean it. But  _she_  had done just that. What must that say about  _her…_?   
  
Later, she had withheld those words from her relationships, feeling they were inherently meaningless. Only something to say, when one had run out of things to say and wanted to fill dead space. She might tell herself she felt love, but the words were simply not in her repertoire. As the years had gone by, she had acknowledged to herself that she got a small rush on those rare occasions when a man said he loved her, and she did not say it back. She tended not to feel a great deal of affection for the men she dated, in any case, not much fondness; she rarely minded when they took their punctured hopes and went on their way. She had never really needed them, in the first place.  
  
She had never for a moment considered saying it to Richard Adar. Love, she knew, was  _not_  what she had felt for him. Nor, more to the point, had he ever for a moment indicated a wish to leave his wife. Saying “I love you” to Richard would have been tantamount to suicide, both for the relationship and for her job. And she had actually never been tempted, never felt the desire to make such a statement, even in the heat of passion. Adar, she knew, was using her for something very far removed from love. And she, in turn, was using him because he was fundamentally unavailable, attractive but not loveable, sexually skilled but not talented… convenient, and more or less risk-free.   
  
Not that she necessarily  _liked_  any of these truths about herself, of course. But she did not try to pretend they were not truths. She tried, if anything, to pretend it was a trade-off she had made consciously: love for career. Passion for responsibility. Family for public service. The risk of pain for the certainty of emptiness, although naturally she did not express that one to herself very often.   
  
It was so ironic to her, that she had twice come to terms with what seemed an inescapable and imminent future of dying alone. And twice, now, she had been yanked back from that precipice and found herself facing something even more daunting:  _not_  being alone. Being with Bill, instead. It just seemed… huge. Not just a doubling or tripling of the emotion she had formerly identified to herself as love, but something bigger in a quantum way; she did not know if she could actually contain it.  
  
And was that love, then? This thing she felt, after so many years of convincing herself that “love” was just a word to fill a conversational void? This felt so  _strange_ , like she might either float away or burst into tears at any moment, like their time together existed outside any known universe. Like something from a novel or a movie, which was patently ridiculous. Like something from a poem, even more ridiculous, because people did not actually  _feel_  that way. It was just words, poses. You could look somebody in the eye and say it, and not mean it, because it did not mean what it was purported to mean.   
  
Because it seemed so much like love was rumored to be, she was naturally suspicious of it. Horrified, a little, at her own impulse to blurt out ‘I love you’ every time Bill so much as lifted an eyebrow in her direction. And it was not even the sex that had accomplished this. The first occasion on which she had found herself biting her lip to keep the words from tumbling out had been no occasion at all, nothing special, just the two of them sitting on the couch and reading. He had reached toward her where she lounged beside him, brought her feet up to rest in his lap, on his extended legs, and had propped his book up on her ankles, and he had  _never stopped reading once_  during this entire operation. ‘I love you’ had suddenly filled her mind, kicking and beating like a wild animal trying to free itself from a cage. He was utterly calm, oblivious,  _happy_ , and she had bitten down those words and buried her nose in her book.   
  
Later, he made love to her slowly, thoughtfully, and she buried her nose in the hollow between his neck and shoulder, so he would not see her crying with the effort to keep silent. He was inordinately pleased she had decided to stay in his quarters, pleased with  _her_ , and she was possessed of an unaccountable desire to be good, be worthy of his obvious delight in her. She bit into his shoulder a little more sharply than she intended, trying to incorporate more of him into her and stifle herself at the same time, and he drew back with a startled hiss, a mild rebuke.   
  
She had meant to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But when she spoke, what came out was, “I love you.” She could almost picture the words sailing free at last, tumbling out into the small space of air between her lips and Bill’s ears, the slow-motion response of terror that would surely cross his face for however brief an unguarded instant.   
  
“I love  _you_ ,” he said instead, with an endearingly earnest expression, and just the slightest hint of a smile. “But quit biting me.”  
  
After a moment, she nodded automatically, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did. Bill nestled tighter into her, began to move again languidly, and she almost thought he was unaware of what had just happened. Unaware that it had been, for her, something inadvertently monumental.   
  
Until he raised himself above her on his elbows, then leaned in and started slowly, carefully, kissing away the tracks on her cheeks that the tears had left behind.


	6. Not Only the Fire

Ah my life,  
it is not only the fire that burns between us  
but all of life,  
the simple story,  
the simple love  
of a woman and a man  
like everyone.  
  
 _\-- Pablo Neruda_  
  


* * *

  
  
Now, she hardly ever cried anymore. Only over the usual things, births and deaths and weddings and the like. Not over Bill and whether or not to love and be loved. The whole human race was settling into its exodus, and Laura was settling into Bill’s life, and he breathed a little easier for both of these things.   
  
It could get a bit boring out in space, navigating the interminable reaches between FTL jumps, occasionally pausing to plunder a planet’s water or a moon’s metals. Months had gone by in this manner. But Bill still felt he would never grow bored with Laura. He could still meet her eyes across a crowd and feel that kick, and see her blink too fast or try to hide a blush. He still marveled that this had come so unexpectedly, his respect and affection not replaced with this other thing, but enhanced by it, by suddenly realizing again and again how much he wanted her, needed her.   
  
They were not quite old enough to be an old married couple, yet most people in the fleet seemed to view their relationship that way, as the product of convenience and a desire for comfortable companionship. Sweet, perhaps, but basically uninteresting; people tended to disregard the more titillating gossip as implausible. Those who knew them even a little, of course, suspected or knew the truth to be wildly different from the popular perception. Knew that one entered the Admiral’s quarters unannounced at one’s extreme peril, these days, for instance; Kara had learned this lesson the hard way, stumbling upon her Admiral and the C-in-C in a fairly heated clinch on what she had immediately dubbed “the Sectional of Loooove.”   
  
The soubriquet had stuck, although after that Bill took greater care to close the hatch, rather than leaving it ajar most of the time as had been his former practice. They had tried to become more circumspect, in general, agreeing to adhere to a schedule, getting the work done first, challenging one another to complete the day’s business more efficiently, in order to free up more time later – although Bill found that kind of forbearance a bit too challenging at times.   
  
This was one of those times. Laura was nibbling delicately on her pencil, and it was beyond distracting.  _How the hell can her teeth be so sexy?_ He didn’t know, but he felt he owed it to himself to find out.   
  
“I’m jealous of that pencil,” he admitted, leaning into her work space, trying to draw her away.   
  
“Clean-up time, first,” she said pragmatically, still focused on the report she was trying to finish. She pointed, never looking, to the surface of Bill’s desk, awash in papers and books.   
  
He sighed and moved over to the desk, tidying things away unhurriedly. He watched her molest the pencil, which bore the tiny, perfect imprints of her teeth all over its painted surface. Watched her put it down before she stood to join him, edging him out of the way and taking over the cleaning with much greater efficiency. Bill liked to watch her hands during this, their fine little bones standing out as she gathered documents and tapped them into neat piles, then stacked the accumulation of books to one side, leaving a work surface clear. Pencils and pens into the repurposed coffee cup, one by one, with little flourishes as she dropped each one.   
  
He hoped that one day, he would get the chance to watch her prepare a meal. He believed her when she said she had been a good cook, back in the shrouded memory of days on Caprica; he could imagine her chopping, stirring, briskly sautéing things, moving with as much efficiency and grace in a kitchen as she did here at his desk. He savored the vision of sitting and watching her cook, not just once but regularly, and knew if he got the chance, he would never tire of seeing her exquisite hands engaged in these familiar tasks. She might bring him something on a spoon now and again, to taste… heaven. A heaven even his old atheist’s heart could get sold on. A heaven in which he was able to provide Laura with a kitchen in which to cook, in which she could offer him tastes of what she was cooking.   
  
Here, now, she offered only herself to taste, and he sampled her thoroughly. Despite her small protest, he hoisted her onto the desk and stood between her legs, kissing her deeply and long, knowing she liked to kiss. His whole awareness focused on her mouth, until she wrapped her legs around his hips, hinting at other possibilities. He felt himself warming up, blood beginning its inexorable swirl downward, and he got even harder when he thought ahead a little. Planning his campaign. At one time he had thought of it as a battle, and thought she let him win; now, he thought of the two of them as being on the same side, struggling together against… what? Not the Cylons, not for months now. Not the public, who were largely supportive at the moment. Against their own tension? Maybe…  
  
Bill abandoned his attempt to analogize. Metaphors had never been his strength. Instead, he relaxed into the work of the moment, feeling confident there as nowhere else. Enough experience, there, to know that if he brushed his hand just…  _so_ , she would make that little noise against his lips, not quite a gasp, not quite a groan. And if he relinquished her mouth, and instead kissed his way…  _there_ , she would run her hands down his back, shuddering when she reached the limit of her reach and pressed him against her as firmly as she could. Arching her back, to get closer still. He knew which buttons to push, and only liked it more, the more familiar it got, like flying a Viper.   
  
She was moving subtly against him now, her hands working their way beneath his waistline, kneading insistently, rhythmically. He knew, a second before she moved to do it, that she was about to free one hand and stroke his erection through the fabric that still separated them; the fact that he was expecting it made it somehow more, rather than less, arousing. She only gave him the briefest of touches, this time. She knew where his buttons were, too, and he knew she sometimes made a game of  _not_  pushing them.   
  
All out of metaphors, Bill just stared as Laura slowly unbuttoned her blouse, letting it fall open to frame the white lace that just covered her breasts. He always felt like a gaping fool at about this point, and it was a sensation he had come to anticipate and relish. Her almost-smirk made it clear she knew the effect that watching her had on him.   
  
“This is easier if we’re  _both_  naked,” she reminded him, and although it took him a second to recover from hearing her say the word ‘naked,’ he stepped back just far enough to give them both room to disrobe. She slipped down from the desk and invaded his space a bit, and he stopped to stare again when her pants hit the floor. Just in the bra, the underwear, the unbuttoned shirt… it was a almost better than seeing her with nothing on.   
  
“You’re not naked yet.”   
  
“I got distracted.” He looked away, stepped away, began removing his jacket as he made his way toward the bunk. “You’re not naked either.” The tanks, the belt… sometimes the uniform seemed to consist of a ridiculous number of pieces, and why did they all still wear them, anyway? Who would care? Not that they had any alternative, since there were no more clothes.   
  
“Where are you going?” She pulled him gently back by his waistband to stand by the desk, upon which she perched once more before running her hands over his bared chest. “I was comfortable right here.”  
  
“You’ll hear no complaint from me.” He was now naked, and she wasn’t quite, and he resumed his earlier activity, leaning against her, wanting to feel skin but enjoying the unaccustomed sensation of her clothes brushing directly against him. “Hey, that lace is kinda scratchy,” he amended, pulling his most sensitive area away from the irritant and tugging at the hip of her panties. “We need to get rid of these.”  
  
Laura obligingly, and adorably, wriggled her way out of the offending garment, flinging it away behind her head with a devil-may-care flip of her hand. Then, also adorably, she looked behind her and scanned the floor behind the desk until she had placed where the underwear had landed. When she nodded in satisfaction and turned back to Bill, he was smiling.   
  
“What?”  
  
“Cute,” he explained, and kissed her soundly. Teasing, pretending they were not naked, he kept his hands at her waist until his forward lean brought his penis to rest against her again, and her sigh, the fact that she was already wet, made it impossible to pretend. He slipped his hands lower, kneading gently at the tight ligaments between her thighs and pelvis, drawing his thumbs down just to either side of her labia and pulling gently to part them. She blushed when he stopped kissing and looked down at her, openly admiring. Contemplating options.   
  
She had gotten past being self-conscious about his voyeurism, a relatively recent change. Now, she leaned back on her elbows and exposed herself even further, tipping her head back and letting her hair slide off her shoulders to fall in untidy whorls on the polished surface of the desk. She almost looked like she was ignoring him completely, until he caught her glancing at him through eyes barely open. He started moving his thumbs in slow circles, and she did not even pretend to ignore  _that_ ; her hips stole his rhythm and lifted to the tempo his hands were setting.   
  
 _Options_. He kept one hand in place, conducting, and lifted the fingers of the other to trace each side of her slick opening, spreading the moisture out from the center. One finger dipped inside her, retrieving still more wetness, and then meandered towards her clitoris for a lengthy visit. He loved to watch her during this, loved to watch her learn to enjoy his rapt attention, learn to _take_. She was already shockingly good at giving back, he had reason to know.   
  
He wanted to take back, suddenly, was too ready to continue teasing. It had been long enough, although she had expected longer. Her eyes opened and found his with a look of pleased surprise, so he felt like he was staring into her soul as he entered her.  _What a pleasant surprise._  To feel her hot, wet, tightness, surrounding him. Familiar, now, but still startling in its rightness. To feel her pull him in, her feet pressing against his buttocks, her hands wrapped around his shoulders, and the look of total concentration on her face. He always felt, at that point, like he had all of her with him, her complete attention, her full mind with his… in a way, even more so than when he felt her come. Then the moment was past, they were moving together, and all he could think was  _so good_ , and  _yes_ , and her name, which he also said aloud when she finally broke against him with a cry and he felt himself follow her down. Inexorable as the tide, and nearly that big, ebbing away at last to beach them there, wrapped around one another, a single organism.   
  
It was an old story, the only story that mattered really, that the two of them found one another under such unlikely circumstances. One tends to think the Fates must be playing some part, when it takes such a remarkable string of coincidences to bring two people close enough to realize they were meant for one another. But that, apparently, was what it had required. A holocaust, a diaspora, nothing short of cataclysm, but the end result for them was that they wound up together. Not just colleagues, or merely sharing a bed, which either of them could have let slide, but _together_. One another’s home. For better or for worse. Which may be partly a conscious choice, but also always has the feel of cosmic inevitability to it. Because it is no small thing, to complete another person in that way.   
  
They had everything but the kitchen sink, and they had discovered that they really didn’t  _need_  the kitchen sink… so they had everything.


End file.
